Foster Fuels contributes to hurricane relief efforts

Foster Fuels Inc. has spent over 100 successive days responding to three record-breaking hurricanes during the 2017 hurricane season.

Working alongside agencies such as the Department of Defense, the Defense Logistics Agency and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Foster Fuels’ Mission Critical division provided logistics and fuel distribution to critical infrastructures across the devastated areas of Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Providing diesel fuel, gasoline and propane to fuel the relief efforts of the U.S. government, Foster Fuels supplied thousands of gallons of fuel a day to enable key facilities to stay operational, such as hospitals, water treatment plants, kidney dialysis centers, communications towers, first responder operations centers, the National Guard and military vehicles.

“This mission has been possible with the Foster Fuels team getting to the right place at the right time with the fuel that is needed,” says Lt. Col. Josielyn Carrasquillo of the U.S. Army. “We are getting to those affected areas, to those hospitals, to those communication towers – building back Puerto Rico to come back to what we were before.”

After initial activation on Aug. 25, Foster Fuels spent over a month aiding the relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma across the Southeast. Then, on Oct. 2, over 130 Foster Fuels’ and allied organizations’ employees left out of Lynchburg Regional Airport in Lynchburg, Virginia, and headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, after Category 5 Hurricane Maria left the island and surrounding areas devastated. Arriving later that day was a barge carrying over 120 fuel trucks that had left on Sept. 26 from Jacksonville, Florida. After nearly three months overseas, a majority of the crew returned home on Dec. 15, making its mission an almost four-month-long process.

Senior Vice President of Foster Fuels Stephen Tibbs says, “I am happy to report that the majority of our team will be home for the holidays. Operations have gone very well, and Foster Fuels has succeeded in every aspect of our mission. This is not a complete end to our mission, but it is a significant milestone. There are many challenges that we are still working on that require a lot of focus.”

Foster Fuels is no stranger to the challenges of delivering emergency fuel in difficult times. Other notable activations include Superstorm Sandy in 2012, which caused over $75 billion of damage; the magnitude 7 earthquake in Haiti in 2010; and most recently Category 5 Hurricane Matthew in 2016.